


No Words

by Ryo Hoshi (Hoshi_Ryo)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Human Romance, Introspection, Multi, Quadrant Flipping for Fun and Profit, Troll Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-19
Updated: 2012-11-19
Packaged: 2017-11-19 01:09:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/567329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hoshi_Ryo/pseuds/Ryo%20Hoshi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>No words, no words, no words no more</i>
  <br/>
  <i>I need no words, no words, no words no reasons why</i>
</p><p>It was their routine: Karkat talked, vocal walls of gray text, and Dave half-listened and thought.  Whatever it was, it worked for them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Words

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in three hours. I don't know if it shows. Anyway, enjoy Davekat quadrant-shuffle/blend.
> 
> Title comes from a Love and Rockets song, _No Words No More_.

Dave wasn't sure where he stood with Karkat.  Karkat wasn't like Terezi, he was more angry and not at all cool like her, but there was something…  He didn't really hate the troll, they had enough in common but _fuck_ if he was going to explain shit like albinism to an alien.  He'd heard Karkat's rant about humans and their weird thing about incest and not being into somebody for such goddamned bad reasons like their sex (Dave's tl;dr summary) and okay, yeah, sometimes it was kind of fun to just tune out Karkat's ranting.

He understood why Terezi had left him.  Dave didn't really understand black romance and didn't give a shit about it, but Karkat seemed out to try to get everything that moved hating him.

Dave was not sure exactly how he felt about it.  It was in its own way amusing, pitiful in a way that made it easy for him to see what Terezi had seen in the dude, but Dave did not really feel much pity for him.  If he did, if he had not found it really just too pathetic for words, he might have felt a bit of pity but no, that was definitely not it.

It was something he was sure that the murderclown of a moirail of Karkat's had realized too, though he apparently had found it more pitiful than Terezi or he had been able to, and he knew Terezi had seen it too in the mutantblooded troll.  At heart, Karkat was like a small puppy barking at the universe, trying to cover his terror at everything and anything (or near enough) by sheer anger and bravado.

Terezi had admitted to him, that when she had tried with Karkat, she had hoped that Karkat would drop his blackflirting routine with her, settle down to what she _knew_ Karkat knew was the script for a matespritship, instead.  Dave knew well enough to read between the lines, that she had known that as the Seer of Mind she had intuited that her hope was false and had realized later the truth, after Karkat had kept it up.

She had not even really needed to dump him.  It had been a late night, Terezi had been needing a feelings jam and hey, humans didn't consider it something only moirails did and it was not really like she could have one with Kanaya.  Kanaya had been Vriska's moirail for a while, and diamonding up with the troll who'd culled an old palemate of yours went against the unwritten rules.  Dave figured she did not go after Karkat and Gamzee because apparently trolls were all about exclusivity in their quadrants—or at least Karkat was 100% certain to have his shit do an acrobatic flip off the handle right out into the void to splatter on the face of some member of the Noble Circle of HorrorTerrors.

(Dave was not going to admit having suggested to Terezi that hey, a flushed threesome with Karkat was totally cool with him.  That was a thing that had not happened, and if it had he had be totally ironically suggesting it, it was not serious shit not at all and he never said anything about Karkat and his rather nice plump rump.  Plump rumps was totally his Bro's thing anyway.  Nor had Terezi cackled so hard while explaining that, while she certainly had minimal objections to such an arrangement and indeed Karkat had quite a plush rump, what exactly Karkat's reaction to such a proposal would be.)

But sometimes he and Karkat found a quiet spot, two knights just hanging out.  Dave did not quite ignore Karkat's rants, just let it wash over and past him, empty angry scared barking at everything to cover his inner sensitive side.  Which also happened to hate everything for making him care and hurting him and generally everything and anything.  Karkat was a cute ball of caring-anger and Dave did not think he would actually want Karkat to be any other way.  There was a sort of deep optimistic core in there, that felt eternally betrayed, and expecting to be betrayed always.

It was most definitely not pity, not in the human sense.  He doubted Karkat would take that at all well, especially when he did not really accept much the troll sort of pity.  How Karkat and Gamzee made it work in any quadrant was beyond what Terezi was able to explain to him, and she _had_ tried while he was bandaging her up, one of the weirder moments where flushed slid into pale but it was totally okay under the human disease of friendship.  Terezi had admitted, early in Karkat's attempts at blackflirting, to him that she really did like it, and Karkat had a particularly spectacular ragasm over it but…

Karkat had not noticed the shadow that slipped over Terezi's face, Dave caught it because he was so, _so_ used to watching for any sign of emotion and…

Dave was not sure about the details, just that Terezi still found Karkat too pitiful and certainly not a troll she could hate, ever.

He didn't know how a troll would describe his feelings towards Karkat. In human terms, he couldn't hate Karkat.  He had more reason to hate Terezi, but he knew her too well to have any more doubts about if she would have sent _John_ to his death knowingly—she had sincerely thought it was only the time player who had corpses stack up.  It wasn't until a version of him came back from the timeline where John _had_ gone through with it that she had found out that iterations of everybody bought it in the doomed timelines.

But more importantly it just didn't seem like Karkat was the sort of person you could _hate_ , especially not in the troll romantic sense, once you actually got to know him well enough for a proper romance.

Nor did Dave feel up to the challenge of getting Karkat to hate him, really hate _him_ specifically.  He was not too sure that Karkat even realized how much free-floating hate he had for existence, and Dave simply did not feel it was good for Karkat.

Terezi told him, when he had asked her help as a Hero of Mind, that his words had a distinctly ashen flavor.

So he would sometimes carve out those private, quiet moments to prod (when needed) Karkat to rant, to lance the abscessed bile sac so it would spew pus and bile and relieve some of the pressure.

Maybe, someday, he would see the moment when it finally bled cleanly, the last of the pus finally expressed and out and…

Listening to Karkat he knew that he would miss this, for all that it meant Karkat would be much better for it.


End file.
